Ice cubes make Jon happy. If he doesn't have ice, he thinks about not having ice, and wishing he had ice.
Our first refrigerator in this house made ice, and that was a great thing. Ice all the time, in the freezer. But a few years ago Jon had the chance to scavenge a bigger, fancier fridge from a house that was about to be torn down. This fancy one seemed to be just like the one Auntie Annette has -- with a freezer on one side. And an ice maker with a dispenser on the outside of the door. A dream come true.
Jon decided this abandoned refrigerator was just what we wanted, so he enlisted our nephew to help him wrestle this huge appliance into our kitchen. It was filthy so he spent a few hours washing it out, spreading all the drawers and shelves around the kitchen, which suddenly seemed much smaller.
There was some worry, when he plugged it in after doing all that cleaning, that the motor wouldn't come on. But it did, to his relief. Then there was the problem of fitting the wider, taller refrigerator into the space that was filled by a smaller, perfectly functional one. He put the old fridge out on the porch and spent the next week or so disassembling the countertop, shaving the edge off the cabinet, finding just the quarter inch he needed to wedge this behemoth of a stainless steel appliance into the designated spot.
To his extreme dismay, he discovered that the ice maker did not work. He began his search on the internet for answers, and then parts. If I remember right, some of the parts that arrived were not exactly right. After some more problem-solving, he got the ice maker to work. Hallelujah.
But then, not very long after that, it stopped working. And there was no clear reason for it to quit. Jon was mystified. He started to buy bags of ice to pour into the bin so he could still get ice out of the fancy dispenser on the front. That was okay but not a dream come true. Sometimes he could hear the ice maker grinding and grumbling away, trying to make ice, but failing. He finally turned it off. It was too sad.
Then a few days ago, he says he heard the machine saying that it wanted to work again. So he turned it back on. Nothing happened and he forgot about it. That evening he was on the phone talking to Rebecca and suddenly he heard a miraculous sound: ice cubes dropping into the plastic bucket inside the freezer. It is entirely mysterious but the ice machine came back to life. He has ice, all the time.
There is no point to this story. Jon loves ice and the free refrigerator finally relented and began production for the man who believed it could work. My question is: how did he know it was saying that it wanted to start making ice again? Most of us believe that Jon can fix anything but now he has taken it to a whole new level. Now he speaks refrigerator.
He does have excellent back-up when it comes to equipment and vehicle repairs, and we pay for that but he never asks for help when it comes to indoor challenges. He is not speedy, as his list is long, but eventually he worries a problem into submission and figures it out. After all these years, it is hard for me to imagine a different way to get things fixed. It's not perfect but it is undoubtedly the most cost effective method -- for Jon, a core principle when problem solving is frugality. So this new skill of listening to the secret language of the Kitchen Aid, this is like a super power.
Stay tuned for more exciting episodes. This is at least as interesting as Good Night Moon -- I am trying to imagine how it could become a children's book. Don't stay tuned for that.
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